Cutting Through The Crap

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Undecided

I can't decide what I'd do if my house were on fire: get outside or watch TV. After exercising, if I were thirsty, I haven't figured out whether to drink water or go into a sauna. Some stuff just is too hard.

What constitutes the undecided voter, this far into the election cycle? Maybe they've been too busy creating jobs or collecting food stamps to give it proper thought. Or perhaps they're so deep into research, going to original sources, comparing the information they've gathered from Fox "news" and MSNBC, reading Daily Kos and Breitbart, weighing the pros and cons, waiting to hear from their college professors to whom they've submitted questions, simply overwhelmed with the data needed to make a properly informed choice.

Or they could be fucking idiots.

I mean, sure, choosing between Scarlett Johansen and Amy Adams might be tough sometimes, or strawberry jam versus blackberry. But Mitt Romney and Barack Obama? Today's Republicans and today's Democrats? It's not as if they overlap much, have the same plans, the same attitudes toward, oh, voters' rights, women's rights, gay rights, military spending, education, taxation, student loans, climate change, science in schools, Medicare.... Nor is it the case that how one feels about some of those issues would take one toward different parties: you think one way about any of them, you're in the same party with the rest.

I think it oughta be, like, suddenly there's an announcement: okay, time's up. Everybody vote by tomorrow or you don't get to vote. For one thing, I'm already sick of the commercials from whomever about whatever. For another, I can't imagine what information not yet available would change minds.

As hard as it is for me to understand how anyone making less than a couple hundred thousand a year could vote for Mitt Romney or any teabaggR; as depressing as it is that the lies of R and R, amplified by the RWS™ and Fox "news," are so easily swallowed, I find it even more amazing and incomprehensible that there are still people too uninformed to have made up their minds. TeabaggRs are woefully uniformed, but at least they've been able to form an opinion. But undecideds? Now??? Still???? Are these the ones we want deciding our elections?

(On the other hand, here I am writing this stuff, as if I might enlighten and change a couple of minds. Who's the potato head?)

2 comments:

I'll play devil's advocate, even though I'm a everyone-should-vote kinda guy.

Obama got elected on a platform of doing a whole bunch of stuff. How much of it did he do? He got blocked by Republican stubborness and Democratic milquetoastiness. So voting for a president isn't the be-all and end-all of social policy.

It wasn't voting that finally got Trayvon Martin's killer arrested, nor which drives forward the progress toward gay marriage, nor which encourages your government to leave Iraq and Afghanistan (not got it in in the first place).

Also, it's not clear that there are remarkable differences between how Obama acts with respect to the very wealthy and what everyone's pretty sure Romney would do: they're both quite willing to indulge the rich.

Yeah, Romney's a dick, but the difference between him and Obama (perhaps hampered by spineless democrats, or perhaps one himself) might not be enough for a lot of people to get involved.

(The only US Political ads I see are Daily Show, and what you post here, so I might not have the whole picture.)

Good comment, Timmyson. I agree that when you compare the two parties against, say other parts of the world, they aren't all that different in many ways.

However, what R and his Rs are proposing, if carried out, would drastically reduce domestic spending on really important (to me, anyway) stuff, compared to what the Ds propose. And they'd do it in order to increase defense spending and further to decrease taxes on the most wealthy. That's not really in dispute.

To my commenters who like to repeat the RWS™ talking points about golf games and how many pages are in the Affordable Care Act, I ask them to say if they agree with those cuts and increases; they remain silent.

I think Obama accomplished most of what he said he'd do, despite massive and unified opposition from the Rs. Health care, ending the war in Iraq, Wall Street reform (admittedly puny), the stimulus: all pretty big deals. And a lot of other stuff, including equal pay for women, ending DADT, etc..

I do agree -- and have written -- that Obama's approach to businesses isn't much different from Romney's; although my point in raising it is in response to the oft repeated and easily swallowed R claim that Obama hates capitalism and has been bad for business.

As to same sex marriage: I do think voting has much to do with it, although I agree it's sort of following the movement. We'll be voting in my state whether to reverse a law that allows it. That the trend is looking good has to do with many things: maybe at the top of the list is the realization, via TV shows, etc, that gays are human beings.

But the fact that the president acted on DADT and DOMA, and has finally fully supported same sex marriage is not, in my opinion, incidental.

And if Mitt Romney (or the people that have bought him) gets his way there'd be a constitutional ban on same sex marriage; making all abortion under all circumstances illegal; voucherizing Medicare; privatizing social security; cutting public investment in schools, roads, cops, firefighters, all so drastically that there'd be no way forward. As I see it.

So, yeah, when the dust settles and Congress has its way, differences shrink; and maybe that's a good thing. But the visions of the two are pretty different.

And I think public opinion, which translates into voting, has much to do with our wars, both going in and getting out. Romney's made it clear he's of the Bush view: you gotta invade a place now and then or people will think you're weak.

For The Sake of My Sanity

Some will know me from my other blog, "Surgeonsblog." Of late I've given over to frothing at the mouth as the world descends into stupidity, and our politics and our citizens seem, in numbers enough to be meaningful, unable to see it. So for now I'm leaving surgery writing behind, if for no other reason than to defuse and diffuse my unrelenting sense of doom, and with no expectation of making a difference. These are things that, to me, are obvious. Except that, apparently, they aren't.

RWS™

RWS™: For those who drop by here in the middle, and wonder what it means: it's my shorthand for Right Wing Screamers, which includes such a long list it's tiresome to type it. (I distinguish these blowhards from thoughtful conservatives, of whom I sort of take it on faith that there must still be some.) You know who I mean: Palin, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Breitbart (RIP), Malkin, Savage, Levin, Ingraham, Doocey (more of a drooler than a screamer), Hewitt, Goldberg, Gingrich, Kristol, Scarborough (+/-), Bachmann, Inhofe, Bond, Broun, Boehner, Kelley, Santorum, Cain. To name but a few. Behold them in their unrepentant disregard for reality: the RWS™